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  • What kind of hard drive?

    Posted by Ross Spears on August 16, 2011 at 1:26 am

    I bought a MacPro a year ago and I am using MC 4.0.5 on it. I am working on a long project — three one hour shows, and I will be needing a lot of storage space. The computer came with one large internal drive — about 500 gigs — and that is now filled up. I am wondering what would be the best harddrives to buy for this project? The computer can hold three more internal drives of 500 gigs each. Should I get those? Or is there something magical out there that is meant for the AVID?

    Thanks very much!

    Never Give Up

    Jan Maitland replied 14 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Michael Phillips

    August 16, 2011 at 1:43 am

    I out an extra 2 x 2TB drives striped for speed for a total of 4TB in those slots.

    Michael

    Michael Phillips

  • Jan Maitland

    August 16, 2011 at 4:26 am

    You should be able to put drives in your MacPro that are larger than 500gb. As Michael pointed out, you have room to put three more 2TB drives in your system in a striped array. You can either stripe the drives to be one, big, 6TB drive or as a 3TB array giving you redundancy (in the event of a catastrophic drive failure). FWIW, I had a home editing system that had this exact set-up on a much older MacPro and it was rock solid.

    The one piece of purchasing-advice I can offer you is this: make sure you buy, and install, drives that spin at 7,200 rpm. Drives running at 5,400 rpm will produce noticeable slow-downs when playing back material unless it’s super compressed.

    I would heartily recommend Western Digital’s Caviar Black internal hard drives. I’ve used them in my systems for the last few years with absolutely stellar results. And, not only are they rock-solid (in my experience) but they’re very affordable at only $149 each.

    Here’s a link to the drives on Newegg: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136830

    Best of luck!

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